August 26, 2022
In 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche, a brilliant young Classicist only 25 years old, published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. In it, he asserted that Greek tragedy was the result of a union of opposites personified in Greek mythology as the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represented form, order, control, and rationality. Apollo was the god of the sun, and the Apollonian values are those of “enlightenment.” The Apollonian is associated with the visual and spatial, for light reveals a world of defined objects, and also with beauty: all those Greek sculptures are a triumph of the Apollonian. But Greek tragedy emerged out of the festival of a very different god, Dionysus. Dionysus was the opposite of Apollo: instead of form, he symbolized energy, process, metamorphosis. Instead of order and control, he embodied chaos and release. Instead of rationality, he symbolized unrestrained emotion and the kinds of irrational thinking characteristic of the unconscious, such as intuition, dreaming, and fantasy. He was the darkness of everything inward, the womb and the tomb, and he was the spirit of music, which moves in time rather than space. But Greek tragedy is not merely Dionysian: it is a union of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites, what The Productions of Time calls an identity-in-difference, and so, Nietzsche concludes are all products of the imagination, which means not just works of art but all of life.
This tremendous insight was not created ex nihilo: histories of philosophy explain that it is a development of Schopenhauer’s vision of a blindly desiring “will” lying beneath the ordinary world of “representation.” Moreover, behind both philosophers lies the Romantic movement, in which such a creative tension of Contraries, as William Blake called them, appears everywhere, including in Blake’s notion of a “marriage of heaven and hell,” of form and energy. But The Birth of Tragedy destroyed Nietzsche’s academic career at its outset, for at the time the admiration of all things Greek was based on a notion that Greek culture’s gift to Western civilization was solely the Apollonian values of reason, moderation in all things, beauty, and humanism, all summed up in Matthew Arnold’s phrase “sweetness and light.” Literature since the Enlightenment had been dominated by a “neo-Classicism” whose poetic vehicle was the controlled wit of the polished heroic couplet. Nietzsche’s thesis that something darker and more dangerous underlay the rule of sweet reason outraged conventional academics. Consequently, as he himself knew, he was one of those geniuses fated to be born posthumously. But he has had his revenge, and not just once, for the course of modern history can be described as the repeated eruption of Dionysian energies, for better or worse, breaking through the façade of what we are increasingly unsure should be called Western civilization, or indeed world civilization, since the eruption is now global.
In the scholarly world, The Birth of Tragedy had a worthy successor in Jane Ellen Harrison’s book Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), mentioned in a recent newsletter, itself a work of genius. The party line since Hesiod’s Theogony was that the Olympian gods, Zeus in particular, imposed order, control, and justice on the lawless and chaotic energies of nature embodied in monsters such as Typhon and personified in the Titans, all of whom had to be killed or put down. Harrison’s subversive premise, again denied by conventional scholarship, was that Zeus, the ultimate law-and-order figure, had over time evolved into that role, but had originally, like all the gods, been an avatar of a dark figure she called the eniautos-daimon. Eniautos is a fixed cycle of time, typically a year, so the term means “spirit of cyclical time,” what later in the developing field of anthropology was called the dying-god figure, studied by Sir James Frazer in his famous work The Golden Bough. Such a figure is Dionysian: unlike the changelessly immortal Olympians, Dionysus was literally torn apart, and then reborn again and again. The Golden Bough influenced a large number of the great Modernist writers of the early 20th century, but Themis is arguably a greater book, because it is not afflicted with Frazer’s Victorian rationalism. In Frazer’s view, reason and science were progressively putting an end to the type of irrational superstitions he exhaustively documented. But the final edition of The Golden Bough was completed in 1913: in 1914, World War I put an end to the idea that we were done dealing with the Dionysian.
The history of the last century is that of a series of Dionysian eruptions from beneath the veneer of an ordered, civilized world. In World War II, the Nazis, influenced by a distorted version of Nietzsche, more or less proclaimed themselves the next incarnation of the Dionysian, although they replaced the Greek personification with the analogous northern figure of Wotan or Odin. C.G. Jung published an essay called “Wotan” in 1936 in which he warned that Germans were becoming possessed by the irrational energies of the archetypal Wotan, and people had no idea what he was talking about, although they were soon to find out. Conventional society is always blindsided by these Dionysian upsurges, clinging to denialism and then being shocked by the breakthrough. It happened again in the 60’s, for both better and worse. It happened in the United States in 2016, when people were stunned as the business-as-usual neo-liberal order represented by Hillary Clinton lost to the uncontrolled will to chaos that is Donald Trump.
In the view of Joseph Campbell, this conflict of fundamental tendencies extends far beyond Greek and Germanic-Norse mythologies. Adopting the theories of Leo Frobenius and Oswald Spengler, he sees it as appearing in the first mythologies of prehistoric times, those of the hunting peoples who lived north of the equatorial desert line and the planting peoples who lived south of it. He calls these The Way of the Animal Powers and The Way of the Seeded Earth, the titles of the two published volumes of his Historical Atlas of World Mythology left unfinished at his death. In a section of the second volume titled “Two Ways to Rapture,” he says that the varieties of religious experience can be reduced to, finally, “two orders: those of the individual in solitude and those of the community as a whole” (32). Hunting cultures, influenced by their harsh environment and by the necessity of killing other sentient creatures, tend to develop a mythology whose chief value is a self-reliant individualism: “The solitary vision quest of the adventuring individual was the type mystery of those rugged races. In its extreme form it is to be recognized in the psychological transformation of the shaman…” (31). These are Apollonian cultures, not in the sense of sweetness and light but because Apollo represents, Nietzsche says, the principle of individuation. Planting and gathering cultures are, contrastingly, collective in their values, as plant life itself is collective. Plants are not individuals in the way that animals can be. They are what Campbell calls cosmic: rooted in the earth, they are part of a larger whole (33). That larger whole is both a ground, in all senses, and a life force. Campbell quotes Spengler: “All that is cosmic is distinguished by periodicity, it has a pulse, a rhythm. All that is microcosmic [animal life] is distinguished by polarity: the word ‘against’ epitomizes its whole character. It possesses tension. We speak of tense alertness, intense thought” (32). On the other hand, “’A human being asleep, relieved of every tension, is in a plantlike state'" (33).
The central religious rite of cosmic religions is the type of sacrifice in which an individuality is surrendered for the sake of, and to become part of, a larger whole. Campbell ultimately makes the Nietzschean identification himself when he speaks of “the tropical equatorial belt of dionysian group ceremonials” (33). Throughout his work—for this distinction already appears in The Masks of God, volume 1, Primitive Mythology—Campbell is forthright about his temperamental bias towards individualism and the mythologies that privilege it. Occasionally, that bias shows through in the coloring of his descriptions. The sacrificial rituals of “seeded earth” cultures can involve human sacrifice, and when they do they may include cannibalism, because eating is a way of in-corporating, of making another living thing a part of one’s one body. If the god is eaten, his substance passes into the bodies of the group members and binds the group together. In Campbell’s description, this ritual is a “celebration of the sublime frenzy of this life which is rooted (if one is to see and speak truth) in a cannibal nightmare” (44). It is not that that is an unfair characterization: the vision of life living on other life is indeed a nightmare. Nor would Campbell, no fan of Biblical religion, have been fazed by the observation that the same imagery lies at the heart of Christian ritual. Catholic doctrine decrees that when priest and communicants partake of the wine and bread after it has been consecrated with the words “This is my body, this is my blood,” they are literally, not just symbolically, drinking and eating the blood and body of Christ. It is the same mythic complex: eating the god in order to assimilate and become one with the god.
But a balanced view would concede that the animal cultures of huntsmen and herdsmen are hardly free of violence: theirs is the kind of individualistic violence that later in history spawns warrior groups of various sorts and eventually armies. There are at least a few times, as when Campbell speaks of the violence of the Celtic mythology and legendry that are his own heritage as if it were a kind of exuberant bar-room brawl. But I am speaking of shadings in isolated passages. I think Campbell’s deeper antipathy to the “seeded earth” way to rapture is that he sees it as the way of “salvation from without,” a reliance on “outside power; another’s power” (32). This is correct, but he takes what I see as an unnecessary further step of identifying this as “surrender to the authority of some endowed group or charismatic individual” (33).
There is a something of enormous importance at stake here, because the examples we have given so far of Dionysian dissolving into a larger group or whole are mostly negative—in fact they are outright demonic. That is because, in the case of Nazis, of neo-Nazis, of QAnon conspiracists, of Trump cultists, of racist lynch mobs, the surrender or dissolving of individuality is indeed a surrender to the authority of some authoritarian group or cult leader. In the absence of any true Dionysian experience of becoming the member of a larger body, the kind of pseudo-Dionysianism that produces drones and zombies, members of a collective hive-mind, immediately begins filling a need that the culture has provided no legitimate way of satisfying. That is exactly what has been happening in our culture of hypertrophied individualism for over a century. Conservatives are quite right to decry the Social Darwinist individualism of the neo-liberal capitalist order that dehumanizes the lives of working people for the sake of shareholder profit. But liberals are also right that the fascistic collectivism of the kind of groups listed above is a demonic substitute for “traditional values” that are no longer the expressions of a living mythology. False individualism opposes false collectivism in a kind of sham morality play.
The central issue is that the Dionysian is not essentially demonic but rather a necessary Contrary—however, our culture has lost sight of what a positive Dionysianism would be like. The 60’s were the one time in the last century during which any attempts were made to imagine a positive form of Dionysian experience—and not just imagine but live. Some of the grass-roots attempts were fairly silly, but they were responses to a felt need. The Grateful Dead got Campbell over a few of his old-guy prejudices by inviting him to one of their concerts: he was surprised to find himself favorably disposed. In The Productions of Time, I discuss two brilliant if imperfect books of the time that speculated boldly about what a liberation of the repressed Dionysian side of modern society might lead to, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959) and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955). But I want to spend some time here thinking about the very different context of our present situation.
As we age, we become increasingly conscious that all is fading, disappearing, and will leave “not a wrack behind,” to quote Prospero’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. We can learn something about the unconscious roots of a religion by looking at how it imagines heaven, and most Christian depictions of heaven are predicated upon the survival of the individual. This is not necessarily narcissistic: each individual is unique, is once-only, and it is heartbreaking when King Lear grieves that Cordelia will “Never, never, never, never, never” come again. As the example suggests, the deeper desire is for the survival not just of ourselves but of those we love, and one of the deep hopes of heaven is the desire for reunion with those we have lost. In the Divine Comedy, Dante is of course on his way to reunion with his lost love Beatrice, but along the way he repeatedly has reunions, some of them quite moving, with lost friends and acquaintances. The theme of reunion is important in the theology of Paul Tillich, where it is linked with reconciliation and the overcoming of estrangement. Reunion, reconciliation, and the overcoming of estrangement constitute a description of the plot of secular comedies as well, and the line between religious and secular reunion and reconciliation blurs at times in Shakespearean comedy and romance. In the Victorian age, the yearning to be reunited with a beloved spouse drove people to séances. The desire to preserve what is unique and precious extends beyond the preservation of other people: in a previous newsletter I quoted passages from Blake’s poem Milton about the preservation of moments of time in “Los’s halls,” Los being the spirit of the imagination. We grieve to think that the best moments of the past recede increasingly out of sight, forever.
Yet there are limitations inherent in the individualistic understanding of eternal life. One of them bursts through the usual conventional understanding in the gospel story of the woman who had seven successive husbands. When the Pharisees ask which husband the woman will be reunited with, Jesus rather shockingly responds that in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage (Matthew 22: 23-28). This could be taken as an expression of the kind of celibate asceticism characteristic of Paul’s letters, the idea that in heaven we will have graduated to agape, or purely spiritual love, which is universal, and left behind the monogamous ideal on which marriage is based. Or rather, on which conventional marriage is based: Eros itself is rather more flexible. Unregulated by social laws and pressures, Eros inclines towards “free love,” as epitomized by the refrain of the Stephen Stills song: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Romantic love, with its fixation on a single object of desire, was invented to redeem Eros from its tendency to be undiscriminating, a tendency condemned by the righteous as a reversion to mere animal lust: “They’re all the same in the dark.” Human love is caught in this tension between the idealization of a single, irreplaceable partner and the fact that, well, desire tends to wander in all directions. In a revisionist view, Jesus might be suggesting something quite different from Pauline asceticism, namely, that conventional monogamy, which after all is a recent invention that the Old Testament patriarchs and kings, with their multiple wives and concubines, never heard of, might have to be replaced with a system more up to the complex demands of human desire. This need not be confined to a simultaneous variety, as in polyamory or open marriage. In our time of long life spans and the encouragement of individual development, we are capable of asking: what if the woman loved all seven of those husbands, one at a time, each relationship being unique and irreplaceable by any other?
The conflict between idealized monogamous romantic love and the wanderings of desire is why the human race cannot enjoy sex. Books are now appearing by young women who are repudiating the “sex positive” philosophy of an earlier generation. They may or may not realize that they are not the first generation to be disillusioned. The failure of the sexual revolution of the 60’s is summed up in the climactic, or rather the ruefully anti-climactic, scene of the film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, in which the orgy planned by four friends ends with a group of self-conscious and utterly miserable people in bed, just sitting in despair, a moment that has become iconic. Even earlier, in the original sexual revolution of the Romantics, the personal experiments of Blake and Shelley in the direction of liberated sexuality ended in dysfunction and accusations from some alienated women, at least in the gossip that has come down to us.
“Positive” sex would be Dionysian, fully given over to uninhibited Eros, without self-consciousness, performance anxiety, guilt, insecurity, sexist manipulation and coercion, jealousy and possessiveness. The inhibitions are not just physical: the limitations imposed on allowable fantasy in our society are much more strict. How far the inhibitions may be circumvented is unclear. The later novels of Samuel R. Delany spend pages upon pages describing sexual activity within the sub-community of gay African-American males that is Dionysian in the fullest sense—which means that a conventional judgment would condemn it as promiscuous and pornographic. Delany’s extensive autobiographical writing makes clear that such scenes are based on real life, a real life in which people may have, not dozens, but hundreds of sexual encounters with hundreds of partners, sometimes individually, sometimes orgiastically—and then return to life with a single partner in a companionate relationship that can be touching in its tenderness. These are not utopian fantasies, or at least not entirely: they are fictionalized versions of Delany’s own life. The implication is that the conflicting demands of individualism, with its exclusive focus, and the wanderings of desire can be navigated, if never perfectly, at least sometimes, by some people.
How far such a lifestyle might be extended outside a narrowly specific non-conventional sub-community is a question. Brown and Marcuse agreed that the whole structure of individualist (and therefore capitalist) society would have to be transformed on a deep level before Dionysus and Eros could be liberated. And I am well aware that many people will be repelled even by my carefully generalized description, let alone by the scenes themselves. I am no prophet of a new sexual revolution, but will make only two replies. One is that the relaxation of censorship and communal conformism has made clear that there is a lot of hypocrisy about just how far the wanderings of desire do in fact wander. The other is that, without some kind of change, we are not just consigned to our puritanism and deprivation. The violent misogyny of our society is the demonic backlash of a frustrated Dionysianism. Denial of desire is like climate-change denial: it produces extreme temperatures and powerful, destructive storms.
When Freud said that human life consisted of love and work, he was half right, capturing the two everyday activities that ground human life in the concrete and practical. But those activities are balanced by two other types of activity that release us from the demands of the concrete and practical, liberate us into a realm that is intangible and yet no less real: the arts and religion. About work, which deserves (and someday will doubtless get) a newsletter of its own, I will only point out in the present context that sometimes we do not want to preserve our individuality, our conscious sense of “I think, therefore I am.” Sometimes we do not want to think, period, especially about ourselves: sometimes we want to lose ourselves in an activity that is all-absorbing because it is so satisfying. To get lost in a project is, odd as it may sound to put it this way, one of the Dionysian joys of life. This is the kind of good and satisfying work that is the opposite of what Marx called “alienated labor,” which is of course the kind of work that dominates American life today. The pandemic woke a lot of people up to how much they hate their jobs. Work may be satisfying because it is in service of a good cause, or because it produces a worthwhile product. But that is apart from the Dionysian aspect of labor: the involving process in which we lose ourselves. I know it through teaching. Once, when I was his assistant, I said something to Northrop Frye about being addicted to teaching. That got an immediate, animated response: “It is an addiction, isn’t it?” The plunge into a classroom session is a plunge into another mode of consciousness, leaving my ego-self behind. My intuition is reading the room, moment by moment, reading the communal consciousness that is created, at least when students are willing to be involved, listening carefully to student responses at the same time I am thinking of how to guide the discussion to where it should go next, timed to end exactly on the hour. It is fluid, spontaneous, improvisatory, a swirl of energy, leaving me dazed and a bit stupid after class. And, yes, addictive is the right word for it—Dionysus was also Bacchus, god of intoxication, and that can be both good and bad.
The arts can be Apollonian, disclosing visions of order that are not only truth but beauty. But they have their Dionysian aspect, most immediately drama and music, which in Greece were originally one art arising out of the festival of Dionysus. In my youth I acted, badly, in a few plays, and spent a good deal of time around the theatre because I loved it. To act, at least for those who truly have the ability, is to lose your ordinary self not just in another identity but in the action of the play itself, of which the character is a part. Actors lose themselves both in the specific role and in the event, the performance, and they do it night after night. However, a dramatic ensemble consists not just of the actors but of all of the stagehands, lighting people, musicians, and so on who also lose themselves in a team effort. The individuals plunge into the collective identity of the team, and the team plunges into the dynamic, metamorphic energy process that we call the production. It is a transformative experience, and can become so addictive that theatre majors have to be rather forcibly reminded that they need to detach from it enough to pass their courses, because for some of them it becomes a way of life that they never want to leave, a sense of belonging to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. I suspect the same is true of athletic teams. I know it is true of dance and musical groups, both Classical and popular.
It is true of individual performances as well. A folk singer-songwriter playing guitar and singing is in effect a one-person ensemble performance: two hands, a voice, and a mind all melded in a way that in one sense is not conscious at all. You do not think of what your hands are doing while you are playing, and if you improvise you do not think about what you are going to play next. You go out of yourself and into another world as a knight in a medieval romance rides out of the court and into the shadowy mystery of a fairy wood. There is a Dionysian surrender of the self even for the writer composing in solitude. Stephen King says that he is conscious of himself and his surroundings for maybe the first ten minutes of a writing session. After that he is elsewhere, and no longer “he.” T. S. Eliot said, famously, that writing poetry was an escape from personality. In an essay on Yeats he admitted that Yeats fashioned poetry from his own autobiography, but in his own essay on composition Yeats insisted that the real creator was never “the bundle of accidents that sits down to breakfast.” Something else takes over. Finally, the audience of a performance, or the readers of a book, lose themselves in an experience beyond themselves. The ego of a reader rapt within a book has disappeared very much as during a dream, for involvement in a book is like dreaming while awake. While we do not necessarily think of such participatory experiences as sacrifices, they do involve a surrender of ordinary conscious individuality. This experience is central to liberal education because it liberates us not only from our egos but also from those social power relations to which the ego is normally in thrall, “subject” in all senses of the term.
This brings us back full circle to the question of religion, and to heaven imagined as a storehouse of individuals, which is not wrong but is an Apollonian half-understanding. What would a Dionysian experience of heaven be like? When you are old, you have to begin learning how to let go—of your ego, of your accomplishments, of those you love. Because they are all going away anyhow, and in fact are already going, moment by moment. Jesus expressed it in the appropriate imagery of the seeded earth: the seed has to die and disappear into the dark ground. The wisdom of the second half of life, the downhill side, ought to be the wisdom of letting go, as the wisdom of the first, rising half is that of building up. It is the wisdom of the Great Lord of Chou in Yeats’s poem “Vacillation,” who cries, “What’s the meaning of all song? / ‘Let all things pass away.’” Dylan Thomas did not agree: in “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he urges his dying father to “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” But Thomas protested too much: all his life he feared and yet was allured by death, and death finally won as he gave in to the false Dionysianism of alcoholism that killed him at the age of 39. If we have truly and fully lived, there might be a peace in the idea of letting go, of finally relaxing the strain of keeping up that tension by which Spengler characterizes ego consciousness. Trying endlessly to preserve not just ourselves but what we have created and what we possess is an exercise in futility. The tide eventually is coming in, and the waves will sweep away all of our castles made of sand. Better, as Taoism counsels, to go with the flow. Better, in Christian terms, to say “Thy will be done”—let the heroic will surrender to become the instrument of a higher power.
But there are two qualifications. First, however we conceive of the “higher power,” we had better be very cautious about mistaking it for the power of some earthly institution, some political or religious ideology or law, some charismatic leader. Institutions, ideologies, or leaders are demonic to the degree that they claim to embody the will of that higher power. Sooner or later, their sand castles will be swept away as well. Second, the seed dies, is gone forever, but out of it grows the plant, to flower like the lilies more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory. It is easy to feel impatient when people say, “When I die, I will be part of nature, part of the cosmic process.” It sounds like a sappy, feelgood excuse. A sour voice within us says, “No, you’ll be dead. Plant food.” And yet that itself is equally inauthentic, so obviously a kind of self-centered sour-grapes pouting. The beginning of wisdom is the realization that all simple, unequivocal expressions of wisdom are really foolishness. When we arrive at the borderline, at the limit of reality and the limit of our powers, wisdom is paradoxical, although that is not the same as saying it is meaningless. What if both positions, the affirmative and the skeptical, are true at the same time? What if death is a purgatorial process, a refining of the self and the life that we have created during our lifetime, purging it of what is evil, what is failed, what is simply unimportant? Maybe it is okay if some of us, and some of our lives, dies forever. Maybe we do not need to become hoarders, saving absolutely everything—okay, the two hours in the Metro Toyota waiting room while they worked on my car, maybe those do not have to be preserved for all eternity. There are precious moments, and precious aspects of personality: we cannot bear to think of those merely disappearing into annihilation. But maybe, instead, there is a harvest, the separation of the wheat from the chaff. Maybe that is what Blake meant when he said that the ruins of time build mansions in eternity. Maybe that thought is what enables us to stop clinging, to let it all go. Maybe that is what “the peace that passeth all understanding” means. And maybe peace is a better answer to all these questions than any possible understanding.
Reference
Campbell, Joseph. Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vol. 2: The Way of the Seeded Earth. Part 1: The Sacrifice. Harper & Row, Perennial Library, 1988.